The 15-year-old kid who 'found' a lost Mayan city says his critics are 'jealous'

Copyright of the Canadian Space AgencyCanadian teenager William Gadoury catapulted himself into the spotlight in April when he and his (grown-up) collaborators announced that he had discovered an ancient Mayan city lost to the sands of time.

One year earlier, Gadoury presented his finding that Mayan cities seemed to align with the stars of various constellations. When he noticed a particular star seemed to be missing a city, he compared the area to satellite photos, and spotted rectangular feature that seemed to be manmade.

The winning combination of mysticism, science, and a bright, plucky kid ignited a firestorm of media coverage.

But when an archaeologist at Texas A&M University wrote a viral Facebook post debunking Gadoury's find, other experts joined in a chorus of skepticism and calls for restraint.

"I think scientists are jealous," he said in the interview, which we first learned about from Gizmodo. "Sometimes they are scared of new ideas. They're afraid to have their established ideas criticized."

Gadoury's statement matches well with what one of his collaborators, geologist Armand LaRocque told Tech Insider when the story broke: That the critics hadn't seen the whole picture, which includes a network of roads and a possible pyramid dozens of feet high.

Satellite images compared with Google Earth show potentially man-made structures beneath the jungle canopy. Canadian Space Agency Archaeologist and astronomer Anthony Aveni told Tech Insider that if there is a city, it's likely to be a coincidence. The obsession with precision, mapping, and a one-to-one correlation with the stars is a product of our culture, he said, not ours.

The good news is that Gadoury has since been awarded a gold medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair and an invitation to attend the European Union Contest for Young Scientists.

He's also been invited to join Maya archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli on a field expedition. After all, the only thing that will settle this controversy once and for all is a view from the ground.